You have no halal

James Fallows posts about a minor UK scandal over restaurants serving halal meat to unsuspecting customers. Since halal meat is basically kosher meat, here’s a time where substituting another religion’s parallel term is a useful heuristic.

(I once read that a lot more meat is slaughtered kosher than is sold as kosher; if so, then if you eat meat regularly you’ve eaten a bunch of kosher-slaughtered meat. Sneaky Jews!)

Of course, this is just another example of picking out some commonplace activity, calling it by its Arabic name, and holding up the result as an example of the inscrutable Muslim form of life. Another nice example is the fuss over taqiyya, which certainly is utterly alien to Christian thought and also to ordinary moral reasoning.

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The slow increase in halal food outlets, in East London, especially, had left me basically unaffected in my mind until I heard a friend of a friend story in which the distant originator, a Sikh, had impressed on my contact that Sikhs can’t eat halal. “Every restaurant that goes halal, that’s one more place we can’t go”, he is said to have said. I don’t even know if that dietary restriction is real, though a preliminary websearch suggests it is. As usual, though, there’s a loser somewhere, but—shock—it isn’t necessarily the white urban middle class.

Dana, how are pickles a tool of Islamofascism? It was hard enough to give up doner kebabs to strike a blow against the Islamnic menace. If I have to give up pickles to, I’m just going to convert instead.

I’d be very surprised if the Sikh consideration had anything to do with it. (I don’t know if I’d describe that as a problem of justice, but that’s a separate claim.) The claim that this is *really* about a cruel slaughter practice strikes me as a thin fig leaf of respectability, unless it’s common in British restaurants to include method of slaughter as a compelling reason to eat their meat.

While Jews who observe kashrut can only eat kosher meat (i.e. halal meat is as treif as non-specially-slaughtered meat), I’ve heard that observant Muslims actually consider kosher meat to be halal. Anyone know if this is correct?

I had had the same impression, but in the other direction: that halal meat was kosher, but kosher meat wasn’t halal. I recall the explanation being that the slaughter methods were interchangeable, except that halal slaughtering required a prayer to be said during the process, and kosher slaughter had no such requirement.

I. The Keshas (unshorn hair),
II. The Kirpan {sheathed sword} (The length of the sword to be worn is not prescribed.,
III. The Kachhehra (The Kachhehra (drawers like garment) may be made from any cloth, but its legs should not reach down to below the shins.),
IV. The Kanga (comb),
V. The Karha {steel bracelet} (The Karha should be of pure steel.)

The undermentioned four transgressions (tabooed practices) must be avoided

1. Dishonouring the hair;
2. Eating the meat of an animal slaughtered the Muslim way;
3. Cohabiting with a person other than one’s spouse;
4. Using tobacco.

Prohibition 4, incidentally, is why the magazine on Stonecutters Island in Hong Kong was traditionally guarded only by Sikh soldiers; they could be relied on not to light up a cigarette and set the whole place off.

Wow, fascinating. I didn’t know about the Sikh thing! It’s pretty common to consider kosher meat to be halal, in my experience, but there’s always someone who wants to make things that much more difficult.

I have a friend who grew up in Algeria in the 50s and 60s (fun, right?!) and he tells me that in his small town the kosher butcher and the halal butcher (really, just “the butcher” one imagines) would sub for each other if one shop had to be closed and folks of either group would eat from either butcher.

The Sikh thing is weird, but roughly analogous to things like stam yeinam, I suppose.

Sadly, Neddy, if you carry out the thought experiment and substitute ‘Kosher’ for ‘Halal,’ you get the same results. The same groups quoted in the story in The Sun – the RSPCA and Farm Animal Welfare Council – have repeatedly pressed the government to ban kosher slaughter on the same grounds, and with the same incendiary language.

Nor is it restricted to Britain. Sweden, Iceland and Norway have long banned kosher slaughter – a ban that has since been extended to Halal. The fabled Swiss democracy that drew such condemnation for targeting minarets has an equally sordid history. The first successful plebiscite in the nation’s history was a ban on kosher slaughter, driven by xenophobia and anti-Semitism, dressed up in the respectable clothing of concern for animal welfare.

The UK – and Europe – are not the United States. They don’t have our traditions of tolerance and separation of church and state. And they do have longer and far more troubling histories of discrimination in general, and anti-Semitism in particular.

I’ve heard that observant Muslims actually consider kosher meat to be halal. Anyone know if this is correct?

There was a widespread story a couple of years ago, which I can’t vouch for but which depended on this. Basically a group of Israeli Rabbis and a group of Palestinian Imams met to discuss local peace initiatives, and one of the agenda items was how to cater lunch. The Jewish delegation insisted on strict kosher observance, and the Muslims replied that that was fine with them, perfectly halal.

It seems highly strange to me that a group of rabbis and imams might agree in either direction on the convertibility of halal and kosher foods.

For meat to be kosher it must come from an animal slaughtered by an adult Jew; thus you can’t (in general) go from halal -> kosher (also because rabbits are halal but not kosher, IIRC); the analogous restriction may be relaxed when it comes to who slaughters the animal whose meat is to be halal, but my impression is that there are other restrictions not directly dependent on the religion of the slaughterer that one can’t be assured have been met just because the meat is kosher.

The UK – and Europe – are not the United States. They don’t have our traditions of tolerance and separation of church and state. And they do have longer and far more troubling histories of discrimination in general, and anti-Semitism in particular.

True. You can’t imagine President Disraeli being elected as prime minister in 19th century Britain.

And the full historical irony is revealed by recalling that both practices, halal and kosher, concern themselves with causing a minimum of suffering to the animal, in the days before electro-stunning had been invented…

Dave: not quite. The Sikhs won’t eat halal meat because halal slaughtering is too cruel. The animal has to be beheaded with a single blow.

And I don’t actually believe you when you say that “both practices, halal and kosher, concern themselves with causing a minimum of suffering to the animal, in the days before electro-stunning had been invented.”

Note that both methods prohibit the use of stunning – either electrical or mechanical (ie with a hammer) – and prohibit the severing of the spinal cord. These aren’t measures that would reduce suffering.

I’m not sure what the original rationale behind halal and kosher slaughter is, but it’s not kindness to animals.

@Lizardbreath, You’ve got it backwards: To be kosher, meat needs not only to be slaughtered in the proper manner, but also under the supervision of a rabbi who must say a blessing. For halal, I’m pretty sure it’s just the method that matters. In any event, halal meat, although slaughtered in the same manner as kosher meat, is not kosher because of the lack of appropriate blessing.

Also explain to me how halal/kosher slaughter is more cruel to animals? At least in Judaism, a significant part of the point of kosher slaughtering is that it is MORE humane: extra sharp knife, a single cut in a designated spot intended to promote the quickest possible death. None of this hanging live animals upside down and clubbing them to death like they do in the secular slaughterhouse-factories.

Of course, there’ve been several scandals recently with kosher meat in the U.S., where it turns out there’ve been all kind of “letter of the law but not spirit” problems that squick people out.

The stunning is a big deal, and there is currently a big to-do going on in NZ, because they’ve mandated stunning prior to slaughter, which has effectively made kosher slaughter illegal. Other practices associated with, but not necessary for, kosher slaughter, like the shackle-and-hoist method (fully conscious animals bound, flipped upside down, and attached to a kill line) have been banned as excessively cruel. (In the case of shackle-and-hoist, it’s been denounced by some rabbis as halachically unsound, because the animals are crazed with fear for a long time prior to death.)

“We have to make sure that kosher slaughter is done in as good a fashion as possible — but I want to do that in a way that doesn’t disrupt a very fragile industry,” he said.

As a result, Genack said, the Orthodox Union is following the lead of Israel’s kosher authorities, who allow the shackle-and-hoist method because they require that cows be slaughtered while upside down if their meat is to be considered kosher.

There is a mechanical pen that can keep the animal inverted while it is killed, but it is expensive to install.